Does the app work offline?
Speak in French: Mantaphrase, an app that enables language foreign conversation
11–20 of 21 posts
Re: Speak in French: Mantaphrase, an app that enables language foreign conversation
#12Does the app work offline?
Their site says it does
Re: Speak in French: Mantaphrase, an app that enables language foreign conversation
#13Re: Speak in French: Mantaphrase, an app that enables language foreign conversation
#14Doesn't Google's Translate app already do this? http://www.google.com/mobile/translate/ Does Mantaphrase work offline? I think Translate requires a data connection. I can't really think of another use case, though.
Different thing. Mantaphrase appears to provide pre-set categorised phrases for you to select, which you can then show/say a good translation of to the person with whom you're conversing. It then intelligently provides follow-up phrases you might want to use afterwards. And yes, this all works offline.
From what I can tell, it's the modern equivalent of a 'phrase book', which makes sense and is a pretty good idea, imo.
As someone else has posted, it would be interesting to know how many users are out there actually using it in the real world. The statistics seem to suggest that there have been a lot of people download it and play with it a few times.
Re: Speak in French: Mantaphrase, an app that enables language foreign conversation
#15Re: Speak in French: Mantaphrase, an app that enables language foreign conversation
#16Re: Speak in French: Mantaphrase, an app that enables language foreign conversation
#17"Puis-je avoir le menu encore, s'il vous plaît?" does not sound 100% correct for a native speaker, although this is perfectly comprehensible. "Puis-je à nouveau avoir le menu, s'il vous plaît ?" would be better, especially coming from a professional application... (also note the typography is not 100% correct too; in French you have to put a space before double-strike punctuation).
Re: Speak in French: Mantaphrase, an app that enables language foreign conversation
#18"Puis-je avoir le menu encore, s'il vous plaît?" does not sound 100% correct for a native speaker, although this is perfectly comprehensible. "Puis-je à nouveau avoir le menu, s'il vous plaît ?" would be better, especially coming from a professional application... (also note the typography is not 100% correct too; in French you have to put a space before double-strike punctuation).
Curiously, even the translation proposed by Google translate is better than the one proposed by this application; "Puis-je avoir le menu à nouveau, s'il vous plaît?" sounds as fine as "Puis-je à nouveau avoir le menu, s'il vous plaît ?", although Google get the punctuation false too.
Re: Speak in French: Mantaphrase, an app that enables language foreign conversation
#19Interesting application but I think they should bring a native french speaker on board. The french sentence provided in the only screenshot isn't correct.
"Puis-je avoir le menu encore, s'il vous plaît ?" is a word for word translation of english. Unfortunately, "encore" needs to be put before the complement and the correct form would be : "Puis-je encore avoir le menu, s'il vous plaît ?". And even like this, it still sound phoney and using "à nouveau" would be better. French tends to be more tricky than english as its rules of construction admit a lot of irregularities.
I don't know how they get the translation. Apparently, they have a set of sentences translated "by hand". Well, if I was them, I wouldn't be too prompt to criticised machine translation as they do on their home page. Google Translate got the sentence they failed right. With a huge corpus (Google uses the European parliament translations if I remember correctly) and proper alignment, the result can be pretty awesome. Google Translate is now really awesome for European language and will probably give as good if not better results than a phrase book but I don't know how good it is for Asian languages.
Did someone compare both Google Translate and Mantaphrase for Japanese or Chinese ? Of course, Mantaphrase still has the advantage that it can work offline.
Re: Speak in French: Mantaphrase, an app that enables language foreign conversation
#20Interesting application but I think they should bring a native french speaker on board. The french sentence provided in the only screenshot isn't correct. "Puis-je avoir le menu encore, s'il vous plaît ?" is a word for word translation of english. Unfortunately, "encore" needs to be put before the complement and the correct form would be : "Puis-je encore avoir le menu, s'il vous plaît ?". And even like this, it stil…
> Google Translate is now really awesome for European language
For major European languages. Try something like Lithuanian and you'll most likely get something completely wrong.